POLSCI 2NN3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Randomness, Sampling Frame, Observational Error
24 Oct 2016
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Document Summary
Social scientists are frequently interested in understanding things that are too large to study directly. You could ask each and every canadian voter, but this would prove to be a very cumbersome, expensive task. Whether the population you are interested in is all canadian voters, or all american foreign policy documents, or all news broadcasts on the. Cbc? (population in this context doesn"t just refer to groups of people the population is any larger grouping that you wish to understand) Sampling is the technique for consciously selecting who or what amongst all the elements contained in the population of interest: that you will actually observe. Who to survey, who to interview, who/what to observe. This is particularly common in quantitative research. However, even in qualitative research, if the goal is to generalize your findings to a larger group: probabilistic sampling is the best way to do this.
